The progressive beliefs of equality, communal dwelling, proletarian morality, and expertise worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated more than a few social experiments which chanced on expression, within the first decade of the Russian revolution, in competition, image, technology fiction, urban making plans, and the humanities. during this examine, historian Richard Stites deals a bright portrayal of innovative lifestyles and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the critical types of utopian pondering and experimental impulse. reading the inevitable conflict among the authoritarian components within the Bolshevik's imaginative and prescient and the libertarian habit and aspirations of enormous segments of the inhabitants, Stites translates the pathos of utopian fable because the key to the emotional strength of the Bolshevik revolution which gave approach within the early Thirties to bureaucratic kingdom centralism and a theology of Stalinism.

This e-book examines the Russian conquest of the traditional crucial Asian khanates of Bukhara and Khiva within the 1860s and 1870s, and the connection among Russia and the territories until eventually their extinction as political entities in 1924. It exhibits how Russia's technique built from certainly one of non-intervention, with the first goal of forestalling British enlargement from India into the area, to 1 of accelerating intervention as alternate and Russian payment grew.

Because the finish of the chilly warfare there was an elevated curiosity within the Baltics. The Baltic States brings jointly 3 titles, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to supply a finished and analytical consultant integrating background, political technological know-how, monetary improvement and modern occasions into one account.

Like different majority Muslim areas of the previous Soviet Union, the republic of Dagestan, on Russia's southern frontier, has turn into contested territory in a hegemonic festival among Moscow and resurgent Islam. during this authoritative publication the best specialists on Dagestan supply a direction breaking learn of this unstable nation faraway from the world's gaze.

Stalin, to borrow Churchill’s word, is “a riddle wrapped in a secret inside of an enigma”. There are nonetheless heated arguments approximately how accurately we must always pass judgement on the Georgian scholar priest who grew as much as be one of many twentieth century’s such a lot infamous mass-murderers. This owes a lot to the enormity of the crimes, as Claire Shaw says during this brief yet chilling ebook in regards to the guy and the political approach that constructed below his rule: Stalinism.